Walkabout to freedom

In 1931, Aboriginal girls Molly, Daisy and Gracie ran away from their white captors and walked 1,000 miles to get back home. Now their story is a film which has stirred up the 'stolen children' issue in Australia. Kevin Maher talks to its director and Molly's daughter

Walkabout to freedom

In 1931, Aboriginal girls Molly, Daisy and Gracie ran away from their white captors and walked 1,000 miles to get back home. Now their story is a film which has stirred up the 'stolen children' issue in Australia. Kevin Maher talks to its director and Molly's daughter

3am. A phone rings in a Hollywood mansion. Action-movie director Phillip Noyce drowsily answers. The timid voice of Australian producer Christine Olsen warbles down the line. She has the perfect script for him. It's called Rabbit-Proof Fence and it's a beautiful, heart-wrenching story about the stolen generation (based on Doris Pilkington's book Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence). Noyce, an Australian émigré and director of the hugely successful Harrison Ford films Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, is unimpressed. He tells her to call at a more civilised time, and hangs up. Then he lies back in bed and thinks to himself: 'The stolen generation? Hmm. Sounds like a rock'n'roll movie to me.'

'And that's indicative of two things,' says the repentant Noyce, now preparing for the international release of his beloved Rabbit-Proof Fence three years after that call. 'One, how out of touch I was, and, two, how out of touch Australians in general have been with their own history.'

When he eventually read the Rabbit-Proof script, Noyce loved it. He loved the simultaneous impression of narrative simplicity and political complexity in the story of three plucky indigenous Australian children forcibly transported far away from their families by a brutalising state in 1931, yet somehow, against all odds, heroically finding their way back home. So he put the finishing touches to his gloomy Angelina Jolie serial-killer flick, The Bone Collector, and dashed back to Australia to 'plunge myself into a world that I had not known before. The world of black Australia.'

What he found was a world already reeling from a devastating 689-page document called Bringing Them Home: The 'Stolen Children' Report, which had been published in 1997 by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. It told how between 1900 and 1970 many 'thousands' of Aboriginal children were removed from their families and communities and sent to live in state-run 'native settlements' where they were inhumanely treated and harshly educated in the ways of white Australia at the expense of their own language and culture. Most disturbing, the report testified that children were chosen on the basis of skin colour, with the lighter 'half-castes' targeted on the grounds that they alone could be 'saved' by intensive Europeanisation and eventual absorption into pure white society.

The issue of the stolen children was incendiary to political Australia, with some outraged critics attempting, as Noyce describes, 'to convince Australians that all of this had been a product of false recall on behalf of indigenous people who could not accept the reality of their parents giving them away'.

Others, faced with the prospect of a nation officially apologising to its indigenous community, launched irascible journalistic counter-attacks. The political commentator Des Moore said in the New Australian that Sir Ronald Wilson, president of the Human Rights Commission, should be the one apologising, not to Aboriginals but to all Australians for the falsehoods contained in his report. The Australian government under John Howard stood to lose up to $3.9 billion in compensation (and still does), and refused to countenance the idea of an apology, with Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron arguing on national television that the small numbers of children stolen didn't warrant the definition of a 'generation'. It was into this simmering cauldron that Rabbit-Proof Fence was thrown when it was released in Australian cinemas in February.

The film is deceptively simple. At its core is that fundamental theme (from The Odyssey to ET) of the homeward journey, this time enacted by three lost girls: Molly, 12, Gracie, nine, and Daisy, eight. The journey is the primal return, to the mother. And yet surrounding that aim is a wealth of subversive subtext. When Molly's mother and grandmother frighten away the local armed constable it becomes a feminist film in which female indigenous communities, bereft of men, operate on the outskirts of patriarchal society. When Molly is beaten for speaking in her native tongue, it is a film that illustrates the oppression of a received language and the inability of true expression in post-colonial society. And when Kenneth Branagh's tight-lipped AO Neville, chief protector of the Aborigines, discusses the need to 'breed out' the half-caste third race, it is a film that underscores the genocidal project at the heart of Australian nationhood.

Within days of its release, the stolen generation controversy erupted all over Rabbit-Proof Fence. 'It stirred up the usual naysayers,' says Noyce. 'They're the ones who, because of their own ignorance, are incapable of making an adjustment to a real history. They're the ones who want to think that settlement was made by the Aboriginals moving out of their lands and shaking hands. Not that they were killed or massacred or poisoned or hunted.'

These 'usual naysayers' had quibbles with the story. The Australian questioned its overall veracity, the Australian Humanities Review argued over which rabbit-proof fence the girls had actually walked along, while tabloid voices simply broke the story down into narrative sections and found lies in each case. The Aboriginal camps were squalid places, and half-castes would have been in danger from territorial 'full-blood' tribesmen. And the girls didn't travel to the reservation by train, they went by steamship and had a lovely time. And they got a free education, too.

And yet, more surprising, and more encouraging, is the degree to which Rabbit-Proof Fence has been embraced by the majority of Australians. The press reviews have been effusive, and the movie has been the most successful in Australia this year, playing at suburban multiplexes for an unprecedented six months. It has received 10 nominations for the Australian Film Institute Awards, at which it is expected to clean up on 7 December.

The Australian reaction has set up a positive populist momentum for the movie, one that's sure to continue on its international release in the UK and US next month. 'The popularity of the film shows that most people are coming to terms with this and want to come to terms with this issue,' says Noyce. 'It says that white Australians needed a vehicle to express this huge shift that everyone has made. And I think that Australians were just longing to do that, longing to celebrate their alternative history, longing to celebrate these women, longing to come out of ignorance. And, ultimately, longing to celebrate their blackness.'

'For me, it is too painful to watch'

Doris Pilkington, Molly's daughter, tells how she came to write her mother's tale.

'I first heard the incredible story of how my mother, Molly, and her sister Daisy and cousin Gracie, escaped from the white settlement in 1986. It was Aunt Daisy who told me her memories and as soon as she finished talking, I wrote it down and vowed to fill in the missing pieces later on.

'My mother had always been reluctant to share her experience, unwilling to embark on an emotional journey into the past she wanted to forget. I persisted and she briefly recounted the part of the trek when Aunt Gracie left her cousins to travel alone to the West Australian settlement of Wiluna to meet her mother.

'Before this I had known only about the time when my mother, my baby sister Annabelle and I were taken and transported to the same settlement in 1940, nine years later. Mum had never mentioned the incarceration and heroic escape that occurred in 1931. Their 1,000-mile journey was the first time anyone had successfully defied the government and returned home. I was inspired to write a book that would preserve my family's history for future generations.

'I never imagined my story would be turned into a film, but eight companies were interested in the rights. I chose Phillip Noyce because he was an excellent director and an Australian who understood the material. Unfortunately, I was ill during filming and couldn't work as the on-set consultant, so my son Albert took the job. Phillip was sensitive to cultural issues and recognised the importance of not breaching indigenous protocols, violating the customs of my people by depicting certain sacred rituals in the film.

'It was very painful watching the early rushes, especially seeing images of Gracie, who was recaptured and grew up with a white family, later refusing all contact with her actual relatives. I cried my eyes out when I first saw the film and even now I don't like attending premieres or festival screenings, preferring to wait outside until the credits start rolling, then arriving for the Q&A.

'The highlight for me was the open-air screening held at my family's hometown of Jigalong in front of an excited audience of several hundred people. As the sun set, we watched the film under a typically brilliant Pilbara sunset. My mother found it hard to relate to the film. Although she recognised the story, she couldn't relate to the girls who played Molly and her siblings. In fact, at that screening many people didn't understand the concept of a performance film and initially thought they were about to watch a documentary. After the nature of the film was explained, they found it moving and enjoyable.

'The film has highlighted the plight of the 'stolen generation' and in Australia it has become a tool of reconciliation; a lot of pain that was suppressed for decades resurfaced after its release.

'The film has also had a remarkable response around the world. In Norway, the audience was stunned into silence at the end before giving us a standing ovation: they compared it to the plight of Romany gypsies in their own country. Everywhere I have been to in Europe, America and South Africa, someone has told me a local story relating to the stolen generation.

'Back home, my mother and Daisy have become celebrities. So many people have seen the film, then decided to go to Jigalong and visit them that the area has become a tourist attraction. Everyone is proud of those two old ladies. Everyone knows about the rabbit-proof fence. And everyone knows that they walked a long, long way.' DP